Are “Gender-Neutral” Spaces for Children Doing Anything?

Harrods–an internationally renowned department store in London–has changed the ways in which children encounter toys in the store. Rather than creating gender-specific areas and aisles, they have elected to group toys thematically. Harrods is calling it their “first gender-neutral toy department.” It’s interesting and wonderful to think that feminist critiques of toy store segregation might possibly be behind this move. I think it probably has much more to do with creating a children’s “fun zone” where you don’t realize that you’re actually shopping–though everything’s for sale. It did cause me to pause though and think about what the heck “gender-neutral” actually means.

My son–Ciaran–was born on April 4, 2011. Preparing for a child was an interesting process. Even before you start trying, you start reading (and there is NO shortage of material), and–if you live in the U.S.–you develop your “parenting philosophy.” This encompasses things like what research you support, agree with, or choose to acknowledge; whether you’ll be breastfeeding and for how long; whether you’ll allow your child to “cry it out” at night; and much much more. Lots of new parents think about gender. It’s something about which we thought a great deal. It’s not that we don’t want Ciaran to have a gender, or to be gendered, or even that we think that’s possible. But, we wanted to control some of the ways in which gender (as an organizing principle in the world around him) was introduced to him on a daily basis.

This issue becomes particularly important if you will need or want to rely on family and friends to help you buy some of the things you acquire when having a baby. Certainly clothing is gendered, but so are pacifiers, baby carriers, bottles, strollers, car seats, teething rings, crib sheets, mobiles, children’s books, most of children’s media (if you use it), toys, sleeping sacks, diaper bags, and more.

We responded in a way that I’m guessing is typical of many couples like us when asked, “So, what can we get for you?” We ended up sprinkling the phrase “gender neutral” into lots of those early conversations.

Gendering Women’s Athletic Performances

Women’s participation in athletics has been one of the victories of the feminist movement.  Policies like Title IX demanded equal access and funding (even if that hasn’t yet been realized) in federally subsidized programs.  Though the amendment had to do with much more than women’s participation in sports, this is what discussions of Title IX are often all about.   Title IX stated,

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance… (Title IX)

The bill says nothing about which sports women would be allowed to play, or how they would be allowed to play them.  There are lots of small differences between men’s and women’s sports.  But, while women’s basketballs are slightly smaller, softballs are much larger than baseballs–a feature that necessitates differences in pitching, hitting, and throwing the balls.  Men’s and women’s athletic outfits also differ.  Consider men’s vs. women’s professional tennis clothing.  But, gendered performance expectations are also lying behind many of the rituals and traditions we hold most dear in many sports.

In watching 2012 Olympic trials for gymnastics, there was one moment during Anna Li’s routine on the uneven bars that caught my attention in the sportscaster conversation following the judging.  We often don’t think about gender performance expectations; we simply don’t have to.  They don’t even typically feel like expectations because many of us are eager to take part in them.  But when gender expectations are disrupted, we know something significant happened, and there is typically a great deal of collective work done to repair the breach.  Anna Li did just such a thing.  I’m not incredibly knowledgeable about gymnastics, so I missed it when it happened, but the significance of the event was not lost on more seasoned fans and commentators.

A Brief History of the Gender of Home Gardens and Gardening

I like gardening, but I don’t have much of a green thumb.  The way I think of it, sometimes the things I plant “take,” and sometimes they don’t.  Gardens and gardening was never something that I gave much thought to as a topic of sociological analysis until a saw a presentation at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings in 2006 that changed my mind.*  I went to a session because Marjorie DeVault was presiding (and I LOVE her work).  It was an interesting panel full of people at all different stages of their careers.  One woman’s presentation dealt with front yard gardens and she convinced me the topic was worthwhile.

Gardens and gardening (particularly domestic gardens and gardening)—as you might imagine—are not topics of study that receive a great deal of attention.  When gardens are mentioned in sociology, it’s often a variable included somewhere in a list of “chores” people do around the house.  Quantitative studies of the division of household labor sometimes have oddly exhaustive lists of chores like this.  But gardens are also a space.  They are places we go to relax (sometimes even while we’re “working”).  Like our homes, they are part of a performance of domestic identity that we labor to keep up.  Gardens are also gendered spaces and gardening, a gendered activity.  Bhatti and Church put it this way,

meanings of gardens are highly gendered, and… the garden is a place within which gender relations are often played out or re-negotiated…  [I]t is necessary, as with studies of the home as a domestic sphere and consumption in the home, to view domestic gardens not simply as sites where man and women adopt different roles, but as places shaped by the continual restructuring of gender relations. (here)

Smoking Rooms – Unintentionally Providing Space for Gender Inequality

In Victorian houses, there are simply too many rooms by modern standards.  The idea was to have a separate room for separate activities, replacing the old idea of simply moving furniture around the room to suit various purposes throughout the day.*  One of the rooms I find fascinating is the “smoking room” in Victorian homes.  Tobacco was sort of a fad in England in the 1800’s, but not everyone was a fan.  Smoking rooms emerged for a few reasons.  Initially, the smell of tobacco was thought odious and people smoked outside.  But gradually, people became accustomed and the practice moved indoors.  Inside the house, smoking rooms became assigned, so I’ve read, because women did not want men smoking throughout the house.  It was a room designed to segregate a very specific activity to one room in the home–a room that was not accidentally situated far away from bedrooms, the kitchen, and dining areas.

Smoking rooms were also outfitted with their own specific interior design.  Perhaps most characteristic of the room was the rampant and excessive use of velvet.  Home owners had velvet curtains made, some of the furniture was upholstered with velvet and smoking jackets were routinely made of velvet as well.  The velvet was thought to absorb smoke to rid its odor from the rest of the house.  It’s also true that smoking really ruined rooms, drapes, upholstery, and more.  So, having it relegated to a single room was probably a good idea practically as well.  Dining rooms were actually initially used for similar reasons (we began to use dining rooms right around the same time that we began upholstering furniture en masse).

Smoking rooms were intended to be used after dinner.  The women might gather in the drawing room** and the men would retreat to the smoking room.  As such, it was common practice to decorate the room in a “masculine” style.  Many men displayed gun collections there, decorated the room with Turkish themes (as Turkish tobacco was what they were likely smoking, popularized after the Crimean War), “worldly” books and objects, and more.

Punishing Black Masculinities in School

Ann Arnet Ferguson’s (2001) book, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity, is a wonderful school ethnography. I regularly assign what is probably the most reproduced chapter in the book—“Naughty by Nature”—in courses I teach about gender. She deftly illustrates the ways that teachers, administrators, and public schools more generally participate in criminalizing young black boys and masculinities.

The book is probably best known for Ferguson’s conceptualization of what she refers to as “adultification.” “By this I mean their transgressions are made to take on a sinister, intentional, fully conscious tone that is stripped of any element of childish naïveté” (here: 83). Young black boys’ behavior is interpreted through discursive frames usually applied to adults and their bad behavior is understood to stand not only for what they are capable of, but of who they will become. Pascoe (here and here) finds something similar in her discussion of boys’ use of “fag” in school. Black boys were punished more heavily and immediately for using the term while white boys were often ignored.

Ferguson also, however, has a fantastic discussion of physical space in the school—the social sites of punishment. She highlights the significance of the spaces in which punishment occurs in wonderful ethnographic detail. The second chapter of the book—“The Punishing Room”—details two separate rooms in the school reserved for students who misbehave: the “Punishing Room” and the “Jailhouse.”

Barrie Thorne, “Borderwork,” and the Social Space of Schools

If someone had told me that the way to pick a research project was to scan my bookshelf, find my absolute favorite studies, and figure out what they have in common, I’d have done a school ethnography. It was Barrie Thorne’s Gender Play (1993) that made me want to go to graduate school. I just learned that she retired and thought it might be a fitting time to talk about how much her work inspires me.

When sex role theory was the way to talk about gender, scholars and activists interested in discussing gender inequality focused on key socializing institutions (where “sex roles” and their associated expectations were thought to be primarily produced) like the family, education, religion, etc. I have always thought that school ethnographies emerged out of this period – though Parsons‘ structural functionalism seems a distant memory to much of this research. Incidentally, Barrie Thorne was among the group of feminist scholars who collectively explained why sex role theory was and is inadequate as a theory.

[SIDE NOTE: Terms like “class roles” and “race roles” were never as popular as “sex roles.” Yet scholars dealing with race and class were certainly navigating similar concerns. Paul Willis’ Leaning to Labor (1977) is a prime example, illustrating how working-class youth are making a choice to enter working-class jobs. But it’s a choice that is structured by much more than their individual desires.]

Lately, I’ve gone back through a number of my favorite school ethnographies to read more about how scholars discuss the role of space in the structuring of children’s experiences of school, the perpetuation of inequality within schools, and the fostering of performances of self at school.

The Bachelor Pad: Myths and Reality

There is not actually a great deal of literature on “man caves,” “man dens,” and the like–save for some anthropological and archeological work using the term a bit differently.  There is, however, a substantial body of literature dealing with bachelor pads.  The “bachelor pad” is a term that emerged in the 1960s.  It was a style of masculinizing domestic spaces heavily influenced by “gentlemen’s” magazines like Esquire and Playboy.  Originally referred to as “bachelor apartments,” “bachelor pad” was coined in an article in the Chicago Tribune, and by 1964 it appeared in The New York Times and Playboy as well.

It’s somewhat ironic that the “bachelor pad” came into the American cultural consciousness at a time when the median age at first marriage was at a historic low (20.3 for women and 22.8 for men).  So, the term came into usage at a time when heterosexual marriage was in vogue.  Why then?  Another ironic twist is that while the term has only become more popular since it was introduced, “bachelorette pad” never took off–despite the interesting finding that women live alone in larger numbers than do men.  I think these two paradoxes substantiate a fundamental truth about the bachelor pad–it has always been more myth than reality (see here, here, here, here, and here).

Sean Payton and the Masculinization of Football

In case you’ve been on the moon recently and missed it, football is a gendered space.  While girls and boys, women and men continue to play sports on different teams, at different times, on different courts and fields, and often with subtly different equipment or rules, it’s also true that by and large, they’re playing many of the same sports.  There are only a few sports that have remained the province of men.  Olympic ski jumping is probably my favorite example.  In a classically awful way, it turns out that a woman (Lindsey Van) holds the world record in ski jumping but cannot compete in the Olympic event because it is sex segregated and there is no women’s event.  Football is one such space as well.  Women don’t play.  They don’t play as girls and they can’t play professionally as women.

[SIDE NOTE: It is true that there is a Lingerie Football League that started in 2009 (and yes… it’s exactly as awful as it sounds).  Women play full contact indoor football in the same arenas where men’s professional sports are played.  The game is unsafe and there are a great deal of injuries as a result.  The women wear less padding, but are extreme athletes and go “all out” in front of screaming audiences of men.]

The most recent issue in the NFL is the suspension of the New Orleans Saints’ coach, Sean Payton for what’s being considered unsportsmanlike conduct off the field. 

On Goffman the Gender Scholar

When sociologists discuss performance theories of gender, we usually go back to Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s (1987) famous article “Doing Gender.”  Some of us date this trend to Judith Butler, but few people bother to discuss some of the scholarship that predates this.  West and Zimmerman relied almost exclusively on Harold Garfinkel’s* analysis of Agnes (a transgendered women who he met with as a part of a UCLA study dealing with “deviant” gender identities) to support their conceptualization.

Beyond the use of data, West and Zimmerman’s article was written in conversation with Erving Goffman’s theory of gender, or of “gender display” as Goffman wrote about it.  Goffman wrote two pieces exclusively about gender.  The first was originally published in Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication (1976) and later published as a book–Gender Advertisements (1979)–which included the essay along with a host of advertisements that Goffman codes for different elements of gender display (for a great exploration of this, see Greg Smith’s work here).  The second is his better known and cited article in Theory and Society: “The Arrangement between the Sexes” (1977).  He wrote elsewhere about gender as well, but these were his two pieces of writing that were really dedicated to theorizing about gender.  For instance, the Goffman quote that Michael Kimmel (1994) used to discuss Connell’s conceptualization of “hegemonic masculinity” actually comes from Stigma (1963).** (As an aside, I think the quote and use of it in Kimmel’s essay is illustrative of an inaccurate understanding of hegemonic masculinity. But that’s for another post perhaps.)

While we have come to celebrate “Doing Gender” as one of the first pieces to actually break with the biological determinism of sex role theory, along with some notable others (see here and here for two of my favorites), Goffman’s lack of status as a “feminist” makes him an unlikely person to be remembered among this list.  

Gender Segregation By Victorian Design

Homes have always illustrated a great deal about those who inhabit them.  And changes in architectural design reflect much more than simply new techniques and styles.  They also reflect changing relationships between groups of people.  Victorian architecture is famous for a number of things, but one of my favorites is the notion that rooms really ought to only have one purpose.*  One of my favorite ways that this is illustrated is by highlighting the lack of a bedside table in most bedrooms in the 1800s in England.  Reading (or anything else for that matter) was an activity that was best undertaken in a separate (and more appropriate) room of its own.

To accomplish this, larger houses had an extraordinary number of rooms.  Smaller houses were forced to shift furniture around depending on what was going on that particular day.  While one of the premises of modern architectural design involves breaking down walls and opening up space, the Victorians were much more concerned with erecting walls and closing spaces off.  There are all sorts of remnants of this time still present in homes today – though they are often put to separate use.  For instance, parlors are still present in many homes.  They’re typically small rooms near the front of the house where household guests would have congregated, and within which Victorian forms of courtship took place (see Bailey on courtship here).  But few of us use these spaces as they were originally intended.  They feel impractical by today’s standards.